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disabling interrupts to approach RT performance?

Please advise if this question is OT. (If so, where can I post it or read more about said topic?)

I have an application that grabs frames from a frame grabber. It is dropping frames, sometimes, 30 frames at a time. I suspect this is occuring due to background tasks or something like that interupting the app. In the future I may go to a hard RT linux, but for now, I just have time to try to reduce the number and frequency of frame drops.
I read on some linux websites that one can disable interrupts to increase performance and/or reduce latencies.
My questions are

1. Is this an acceptable practice? If not, what are my other options?

2. How can I do this?
Would I use:
void local_irq_save(unsigned long flags);
void local_irq_restore(unsigned long flags);